Yes, arsenic in rice is a real thing. It's not some hippie blogger conspiracy theory.
This poison and known carcinogen is commonly found in hazardous levels in one of the world's
most popular staple foods. But how dangerous it is to YOU depends enormously on how much
rice you eat, what kind of rice you eat, how you cook it, and whether or not you are a
baby.
As a non-baby American who eats rice maybe once a week, I don't worry about this at all
in my own diet, but you may be a different kind of person.
Known by the chemical symbol As, arsenic occurs naturally in organic and inorganic forms.
It can be acutely poisonous in large doses, with symptoms ranging from abdominal pain
to rapid death within a day or two. It was quite popular as a discrete means of murder
until the 19th century British chemist James Marsh invented a forensic test for arsenic
and the jig was up.
Organic arsenic is considered less dangerous, and it's commonly found in some seaweed and
shellfish where it's generally not a very big deal. Inorganic arsenic is more dangerous
— chronic exposure via rice may be a cause of cancer — lung and bladder cancer, in
particular. Also heart disease and type 2 diabetes. As you can see in this risk assessment
from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the cancer correlation is almost directly
proportional to how much rice you eat. If you eat rice three times a day, this is something
that you might want to be thinking about.
How does arsenic get into rice? Because it's in the water.
This is not rice. Nobody grows rice anymore in the American state of Georgia, where I
live. This is grass growing in a puddle on a farm. Thing is, that's basically what rice
is. It's the seed of a grass that grows in artificial puddles called paddies. It's the
only major food crop grown in flooded ground. It sits around in the water all day long,
and it absorbs and concentrates way more of whatever is in there.
So how does inorganic arsenic get into the water and soil?
"It comes from many sources. It depends where in the world you are."
That's biochemist Andrew Meharg at Queen's University Belfast — he's probably the most
prominent English-language scientific voice on this topic.
"It can be naturally geogenic arsenic. It can be in irrigation waters, and that's known
over large parts of southeast Asia. It can be added as pesticides as was used in the
U.S. until very recently. So, where rice crops followed cotton crops, there were allowed
to use arsenical pesticides on cotton, and if rice followed in rotation, it would obviously
have arsenic in the soils."
Indeed, much of Dr. Meharg's research is on rice grown here in the American South, in
particular Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas — the south-central region. There's a lot of rice
grown there, and it tends to have a lot of arsenic. Maybe it's just part of the natural
geology. Maybe it's due to the pesticides used on cotton fields, maybe it's due to industrial
pollution. Coal has a lot of arsenic in it.
Maybe all of the above. Nobody knows for sure.
"Not until the farmers let the studies be conducted and put a lot of resources into
it, you won't find out what the sources are. So unless somebody's doing that work — I
can't do that work, for multiple reasons, sitting here in Ireland. But I don't think
I'd be very welcome into the paddy fields of the south-central region."
Naw, man, they'd love you in Texas.
The other big rice-growing region in the U.S. is California, and California rice has way
less arsenic. Globally, this problem varies a lot from place to place. Dr. Meharg's other
main area of concern is Bangladesh. In contrast, rice from India and Pakistan tends to be a
lot better. Chinese rice has problems with both arsenic and cadmium.
This is generally something that you can pretty easily google if you want to find out about
your rice. The problem is, you might not know where your rice came from — it is a global
commodity crop, after all. They're not growing this Kroger rice in Cincinnati — that's
just where the company is headquartered.
If you're willing to pay for it, you can get rices with some kind of regional or national
origin certificate on them. This cost about four times the Kroger-brand rice.
It also matters what type of rice you get. Aromatic rices like jasmine and basmati tend
to have less arsenic. And this is probably the only respect in which white rice is actually
healthier than brown rice. Brown rice has way more arsenic.
"It tends to concentrate in what's called the aleurone, which is a rather technical
name for a layer of rice which is included in bran. So when you take off the bran, you
will take off about 50% of the arsenic loading for the rice."
There's also ways of cooking rice that can minimize the arsenic, and we'll get to those
momentarily. But first, you might notice something different about my fibrous outer bran coating.
I got new clothes from Bombfell, the sponsor of this video. Bombfell is a personal styling
service for men that makes it easier for guys to shop and to dress better.
You go to the website and you take a style quiz — no, I do not need fancy clothes for
work. I basically only ever put on pants when I'm gonna be on camera. A real, human stylist
at Bombfell picks out clothes for you — you can preview the choices before they ship out.
The clothes arrive in the mail, you get a week to try them on, and anything you don't
like you throw in this bag and send back for free. You only pay for what you keep. Note
the tape measure so that I can send my stylist more accurate measurements.
I absolutely hate clothes shopping and thinking about my appearance generally, so if I'm gonna
replace any of my old ratty stuff, it's gonna be because somebody else does it for me.
And Bombfell my stylist sent me these classy new slacks that my wife is very happy about.
It's clearly higher-quality fabric than what I usually buy — should hold up a few more
years.
If you need a new fibrous outer coating, save $25 on your first Bombfell order by going
to bombfell.com/ragusea. Get 25 bucks off with my link in the description.
Now, again, if you're like me in that you don't eat rice all that frequently, this whole
arsenic thing probably poses a pretty minimal risk to you. But if you're somebody who eats
rice every day, there are things you can do in the kitchen to minimize your exposure.
Dr. Meharg says rinsing your rice before cooking probably does not help very much. Soaking
it overnight — like you'd do with beans — that's better, he says. It opens up the
structure of the grain, but then you have to flush it clean through cooking.
"The arsenic is relatively soluble within the rice grain and you can cook it out. But
most people cook the rice to dryness. They'll just add enough water and the water will be
absorbed or evaporate to dryness, and that just locks in the arsenic. Unfortunately it's
quite mobile in your stomach then. So, the same mobility that allows it to be leached
out from cooking water allows it to be leached out into your bloodstream."
So what to do instead? Cook you rice the way that you'd cook pasta. A big pot of water
— the bigger, the better for removing arsenic. For making it taste good, put in enough salt
to make taste like seawater, just like pasta. Bring the water to a boil and dump in the
rice. Once you get it in there, it cooks faster than it would at a simmer — takes about
12 minutes for white rice, I find. You can test it with a fork. Just dip into the rice
with a fork and a few nicely drained grains will come out that you can then taste. Just
like pasta, I think you should drain it when it's still slightly crunchy — it'll keep
cooking as it cools. Some people put it back into the pan to cook off the remaining moisture.
I think it works better to just toss it in the sieve a few times and then let it steam
off. A lot people prefer their rice like this anyway. It's certainly fluffier rice, if you're
into that. And Dr. Meharg says if you soak your rice in a lot of water overnight, and
then cook it in a lot of water the next day, you can remove about 80% of the arsenic.
There is a catch, though, which is that you'll be washing away some of the nutrients. Here
in the States, most of our rice is fortified — that's what these extra ingredients on
the bag are. This is extra nutrition that they spray onto the exterior of the grains.
"You will lose any fortified vitamins and mineral nutrients potentially in it. And,
also, rice is an important source of B vitamins, which are soluble. But I suspect that's less
relevant to an American diet than it is to a Bangladeshi diet, for example."
Yeah, we eat a ton of meat here in the States, and meat is full of B vitamins. If you're
eating a reasonably rich and varied Western diet with lots of vegetables, this is probably
a non-issue for you. Europeans don't fortify their rice and they're still alive.
That leads us, finally, to the part of this that is really relevant to Westerners, and
indeed, everybody — the problem of arsenic and kids. For generations, all over the world,
this has been the most popular first solid food that parents feed their babies. You mix
it with water, you have rice porridge.
"You look at the constitution of many foods that are specifically manufactured for children,
and they're rice-based. And that's for two reasons: they're relatively bland and they're
also gluten-free. Babies eat three-times as much food on a bodyweight basis as an adult.
So for any particular source, they're getting three-times more exposed to arsenic than what
an adult is."
And that means much greater cancer and diabetes risk. There's also some research indicating
that arsenic in food can be a neurotoxin with kids. They lose IQ points. By the way, arsenic
is also found in fruit juice, that's the other big place.
This may be a relatively minor risk compared to all of the other risks in life, but nonetheless
I see no reason at all to give this to your baby. Not just this brand — any brand. There's
just too many other good options. We mostly fed our kids oat cereal.
The European Union, in recent years, has set standards for the maximum inorganic arsenic
levels in foods — particularly strict standards for baby foods, though still not strict enough,
in Dr. Meharg's opinion.
Here in the U.S., as per usual, we're not as quick to regulate agribusiness. This FDA
risk assessment notes that if we adopted standards comparable to the EU limits, that would knock
out as much as 93% of rice and rice products in our market, depending on the type of rice.
Decide for yourself whether you think that's a good reason to not do it.
And, it's important to note, once again, that arsenic in rice poses a relatively minor risk
in our lives. Again, quoting from the FDA, 39 cases of lung or bladder cancer per million
people are attributable to rice. 39 cases per million people. That's out of about 90,000
per million people who get those cancers. So if you smoke, good lord, deal with that
before you worry about your rice.
But you should worry about your wardrobe immediately, especially if you're a shlub like me. Get
25% off your first Bombfell order by using my link in the description.